I returned to the front of the classroom today after six years in abeyance, teaching my first session of my first section of English 101 at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). It was fun. I’m already thinking about how I’m going to change my syllabus next semester!
I never stopped wanting to teach. I never stopped loving teaching. But at a certain point, teaching became an unacceptably bad deal for me. My doctorate was in classics, and I was not likely to get a full-time classics job in New York. With my husband starting a full-time professorship at BMCC (this was back in 2013), I was not going to chase a full-time tenure-track job around the country. Adjuncting, meanwhile, was—well, my husband and I used to say that every hour I taught as an adjunct, we were losing money, because I made so much more as a freelance medical writer, that teaching as an adjunct assistant professor was truly financially untenable. So I taught my last class at Brooklyn College in the fall of 2012 (I taught a noncredit Latin Reading Course at the Language Reading Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY, in the spring of 2013, but that’s a horse of a somewhat different color). I was glad—or maybe relieved would be more accurate—that the adjunct life was behind me, because it felt so awful to be so under-compensated for the work I was doing. On the other hand, I missed teaching, and I missed the way being in the classroom stimulated my thinking about critical theory, critical culture, and related issues.
So what has changed now? Bottom line, the reason I sought adjunct work again after all these years is that we needed the money. The medical communications industry has changed quite a bit since I entered it 25 years ago, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to make a good living as a freelance medical writer. I also didn’t like freelance medical writing. I liked writing about HIV and other sexual health issues, but even in that arena, I didn’t like doing it in the context of pharmaceutical marketing, which was nearly always the case given the way my freelance practice was structured. So during the course of 2017, I started building a short-term rental business (a.k.a. Airbnb) in the two-family house my husband and I own. Then, in December 2017, I completed what I decided was my last freelance writing project, ever. The idea was that the short-term rental income would more or less replace the medical writing income. Nice idea; didn’t happen. At least, it has not happened yet. So in May 2018, I started putting out some feelers to classics departments, but also to the English department at BMCC. And they came through for me with a section of English 101, English Composition, and a section of English 201, Introduction to Literature.
Classes started yesterday and I taught my first class today. Now that I’m doing it, I realize it’s something I need to be doing, and not just for the money. The classroom is where I belong. A full-time job would have been nice, and would still be nice if an appropriate one were to come along. But even at my current adjunct assistant professor rate, I can make it work, especially now that my husband, now an associate professor, is making a pretty good living. And that short-term rental business, while not replacing what I made at the height of my freelance medical writing career, is a very helpful income stream. These days, it’s all about multiple streams of income. And if one of those streams speaks to my soul, well—that’s not a bad deal.
And so here I am, resuming my blog about issues of pedagogy, critical thinking, and critical culture. When I sat down to write this post, I intended to write about the epiphany I had after class today about the concepts of academic writing, argumentative writing, and critical writing—but, as usual, I got bogged down in preliminaries for some 600-plus words, so…that post will wait for another day. Another day soon.